Field Notes

Dear Father...

New Exhibition Features Letters from a Roman Soldier in Egypt

The young Roman soldier Claudius Terentianus, who was stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, never dreamed that his letters home would still be read 2,000 years later.

In the 1920s University of Michigan archaeologists found dozens of Claudius’s letters—addressed to his father, Claudius Tiberianus—while excavating an ancient house in the town of Karanis, 50 miles southwest of modern Cairo. The letters, written in Latin on sheets of papyrus, were preserved by Egypt’s arid climate.

For the first time since the papyri were discovered, the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology has mounted an exhibition, to run through May 2, 2005, that reunites these letters with artifacts recovered from the Tiberianus’s family home. The objects found in the home include fragments of a shallow glass bowl and a footed cup, comb and lamp. The archaeologists also found beautiful glass beads, made to resemble emeralds, and an imported faience bowl, suggesting that the family was wealthy.